Feminist science and epistemologies: Key issues central to GENNOVATE's research program

This methodological brief offers a window into GENNOVATE’s innovative collaborative research initiative to promote gender equality in agricultural and natural resource management. It addresses questions such as 1) Why is it important to distinguish among epistemology, methodology, and methods?; 2) What is feminist epistemology?; 3) What can researchers of gender, agriculture, and innovation learn from engaging the contributions of feminist epistemology?; and 4) How has GENNOVATE integrated lessons from feminist methods and feminist epistemics about gender relations, agricultural change, and innovation

Historicizing Garment Manufacturing in Bangladesh: Gender, Generation, and New Regulatory Regimes

The contemporary Bangladesh economy is marked by sustained increases in women’s paid employment, a rise that began in the 1980s with complex and contradictory effects on the lives of women and communities. Today this increase in the numbers of employed women recasts gender relations and the gender and social contract, with wage employment leading to new sources of mobility and social, economic, and political freedoms for women, but also to contestation over rights and security, and, in some cases, to declines in women’s welfare. In this paper, I offer a window on the relationship between macro-economic changes in the Bangladesh political economy, the meso-institutional changes created by policy reform, and changes in women’s labor market relations. I highlight emergent relations of regulation as they create, organize, and control women’s social behavior and normative practice. As I will suggest, the emergent gender division of wage employment in Bangladesh unsettles the causality presumed when changes in economic and cultural organization build on an already available pool of surplus labor that can straightforwardly lead to changes in women’s behavior. Three themes animate this discussion. One theme emphasizes the contradictory effects that incorporation into export production has for women; they are simultaneously emancipatory and highly exploitative. Second, I note that neoliberal reforms articulate differently in particular places making it crucial to draw attention to how specific antecedent labor force practices, ideologies, and policies contribute to constructing a female labor force. Finally, I suggest that women are increasingly viewed as disposable and redundant even as their labor is becoming central to imaginings of family maintenance and sustainability

Shelley Spector: I Live Here

Exhibition catalogue for Shelley Spector's 2016 exhibition at Room & Board, Brooklyn

Ein neuer Blick auf die Vergangenheit, Visionen der Zukunft: Das Muktijoddha Jadughar (Liberation War Museum) in Bangladesch als Schau-Platz des Widerstands

Twenty-four years after an anti-colonial struggle against the British, the war in East Pakistan was a struggle for a second independence, this time from Pakistan. It took another twenty-five years for a constituency of public citizens to build a national war museum demanding recognition of this genocidal liberation war and its freedom fighters. Focusing on the Muktijoddha Jadughar (Liberation War Museum) as a site of recuperation and contestation, I offer a reading of Bangladeshi history that acknowledges the centrality of independence in (re)constructing national belonging. Drawing on debates on state and nationalism, and museums and memory I show how publics can "rescue history from the nation" and challenge exclusions in the hegemonic nationalist narrative. In this account, the crises of military rule and fragile democratic governments are charted to highlight ongoing tensions between secular versus religious state forms and demands for accountability from those identified as enemy collaborators. Evidence drawn from the Museum collection and archival materials provide the case material for the argument that resistance to the exclusion of events offers a critical site for examining challenges to current accounts of Bangladeshi history.24 Jahre nach der Entkolonisierung wurde im damaligen Ostpakistan ein zweiter Kampf für Unabhängigkeit ausgefochten, diese Mal gegen Pakistan. Es dauerte weitere 25 Jahre, bis es einem Zusammenschluss von in der Öffentlichkeit stehenden Bürgern gelang, ein Nationalmuseum zum Gedenken des Freiheitskampfes (Muktijuddo Jadughar) zu bauen. Dieser Artikel begreift das Museum als Ort der Zurückerlangung und Aushandlung einer bestimmten Lesart der Geschichte. Hierbei steht die Anerkennung der Bedeutung der Unabhängigkeit für die (Re-)Konstruktion nationaler Zugehörigkeit im Mittelpunkt. Anhand von Debatten um Staat und Nation, Museum und Erinnerung wird gezeigt, wie Öffentlichkeiten "die Geschichte vor der Nation retten" und die Exklusionspraktiken hegemonialer nationalistischer Lesarten in Frage stellen. Die durch Militärherrschaften und fragile Demokratie hervorgerufenen Krisen verweisen dabei auf fortwährende Spannungen zwischen religiösen und säkularen Staatsformen und Forderungen, die vermeintlichen Kollaborateure zur Rechenschaft zu ziehen. Um die Herausforderungen für die aktuelle Geschichtsschreibung anhand des Wiederstands gegen die Exklusion von Ereignissen nachzuzeichnen, wird in dem Museum und seinem Archiv gesammeltes Datenmaterial verwendet

The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations in Contemporary Bangladesh

Constructing religious difference as a national security threat, the Vested Property Act, whose legacy dates from the period of East Pakistan, marks Bangladeshi Hindus as citizens whose allegiance to the country is always suspect. This paper explores the social production of Hindu difference through legal claims to the right to private property. I draw on shifting policy reforms to show how land rights and the control of private property, embedded in historical, social, political, and cultural relations, shape the security of people and their subjectivity. I argue that constructions of Hindu identity are marked by particular relations of social inclusion that are consequential for enacting rights claims in the interests of private accumulation

Qualitative, comparative and collaborative research at large scale:The GENNOVATE Field Methodology

We present a field-tested “medium-n” qualitative comparative methodology, which enhances understanding of the strong and fluid influence of gender norms on processes of local agricultural innovation in the Global South. The GENNOVATE approach (“Enabling Gender Equality in Agricultural and Environmental Innovation”) weaves together three broad methodological challenges—context, comparison, and collaboration—and highlights how addressing the social context of innovation contributes to applied research. We discuss GENNOVATE’s analytic approach, sampling framework, data collection, and analysis procedures, and reflect critically on the research strategies adopted to document and learn from the perspectives and experiences of over 7,000 women and men in 137 villages across 26 low- and middle-income countries

Feminization, rural transformation, and wheat systems in post-soviet Uzbekistan

This paper examines how rural transformation in Uzbekistan alters gender norms and roles and, consequently, affects women’s involvement in agriculture. We focus on the role that contextual factors, particularly kinship relations, government goals, and institutional structures each contribute to rural transformation and male outmigration, and how these, in turn, increase women’s work in wheat production and processing. The wheat is the most important crop in the country which has the highest area coverage (35%) in Uzbekistan. We begin by highlighting the post-Soviet transition in Uzbekistan and its effects on the agricultural sector, including how households respond to opportunities for innovation. We then move to a discussion of our methodological approach drawing on insights from the GENNOVATE project, a collaborative initiative across 11 CGIAR centres that explored the relationship between changing gender norms in relation to women’s roles in agricultural production and processing. Next, we examine an understudied topic in migration research i.e., how the transformation of agriculture contributes to increased dependence on unpaid female agricultural labour. We conclude with an analysis of how the feminization of agriculture alters household relations and women’s participation in the public sphere. Significantly, we close with a reflection on what these changes mean for gender and innovation studies

Can Blacklisting Reduce Terrorist Attacks?

Within global security governance, a number of governments monitor and label certain organizations as “terrorist groups” with the aim of curtailing their capacity. The most prominent example of this is the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list. Under what conditions is FTO listing an effective counterterrorism tool? We develop a theory of blacklisting in the context of FTOs, arguing that the impact of FTO designation depends on the types of support terrorist organizations rely on. We theorize that FTO blacklisting has capacity-curtailing effects on terrorist groups when funding sources are vulnerable to detection, sanctions, and stigmatization. Specifically, we hypothesize that groups with private funding (e.g. charities, diaspora networks) are more likely to reduce attacks after FTO designation, compared to groups with other funding sources such as criminal activities. Analysis of data on terrorist organizations between 1970 and 2014 takes into account the political processes of listing and provides support for the argument. The findings highlight the importance of understanding the nature of the target in evaluating the performance of global indicators